Protest politics and the ethical imagination

Protest, like marriage, means re-imagining relations to self and other. The Taksim Square Book Club - in which demonstrators in Istanbul stood silently and read books - used reflection as a riposte to state brutality. The ethical imagination is at the root of this.

What makes love and politics go together?
During the 2011 protests in Egypt, a couple got married in Tahrir Square. In June this year, two teachers held their nuptials in Taksim
Square during protests against the Turkish government. And last
month, two protestors who fell in love in the course of their
involvement in the protests turned up with a thousand guests to
celebrate their wedding in the same square and were dispersed by
anti-riot police using water cannons and tear gas. ‘Long live the
resistance, long live love’.

From
an anthropological point of view, these marriages – by no means
unique - tell us something of interest about contemporary politics.
Protest, like marriage, implies a resetting of horizons, the possible
start of something new. It is through these attachments to others
that we remake ourselves. The passion, commitment and emotion
expressed by protestors from Zuccotti Park to Taksim Square – and
well beyond – are linked to profound feelings of hope and
aspiration: the desire to make the world anew.

It
is impossible to explain social and political transformations without
linking them to personal hopes and aspirations. Politics, like love,
involves an attachment to others. The I makes no sense without the
you, nor the self without the other. Without a sense of others –
and of our difference from them – we have no sense of self,
because the not-me is a constitutive element of self. We intuitively
understand this in our family relations where we often struggle to
make sense of who we are, of what makes us unique or truly ourselves.
We may identify with our parents, love and admire them, but we don’t
necessarily want to be them or even be like them.

Paradoxically, our
sense of self rests in large part on understanding who we are not.
If we did not have the means and the capacity to imagine relations
with others both by identifying with them and by differentiating
ourselves from them, we would not and could not be a self.

Consequently,
we live our lives in relation to others, both those who are our
intimates and those who are very far away from us and whom we may
never meet. I may make myself in relation to my family, but I may
also do so in relation to issues of social injustice, political
causes and structural wrongs such as poverty where I engage with how
these things impact on other people’s lives. I term this human
capacity the ethical imagination.

We
can immediately grasp how the ethical imagination, the manner and
the means through which we imagine
our relations to self and to others underpins much of what we mean by
the political. There is currently an ongoing and well recognised
crisis in democracy and in the character of the political - not just
in how we share this world with others, and in how we imagine
ourselves in relation to others, but in the very character of
political agency, in how we recognise ourselves as political agents
and what we believe political agency is about.

Take
one example. Performance artist Erdem Gunduz stood in silent vigil on
17th
June 2013, for eight hours, in Istanbul’s Taksim square facing the
Ataturk Cultural Centre covered in Turkish flags and a large portrait
of the founder and moderniser of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

His
action prompted a group of protestors to found the ‘Taksim Square
Book Club’ where demonstrators, some masked, stood silently and
read books. An apparent favourite was George Orwell's1984,
but many others were reading philosophical texts and novels by
Belgian, Japanese,
French and German writers, as well as Turkish.
Silent
reflection and critical thought are a powerful riposte to police
violence and state brutality, and they are part of a wider critique
of democracy and the political that has emerged since 2008.

It
is very often said that protests such as these are media led, Twitter
organised, Facebook inspired: a feature of an over connected, over
mediated and overheated world. This seems to me to be a rather
impoverished way of comprehending these kinds of encounter. Such
imaginative acts are precisely about reconfiguring self-other
relations, but this does not mean that their outcomes are explicitly
spelled out or attached to specific programmes of political change.

They are certainly about acting, but they are also in that moment of
doing about self-stylisation, about newly imagined relations to self
and to others that lead – hopefully – to novel ways of
approaching social and political transformation. Acts that are
designed to stand outside cycles of violence and shift the terms of
reference are the very terrain of the political.

It
is no surprise then that the texts that play such a prominent role in
these protests should come from all over the world, and be written in
many languages. Ideas and ways of thinking open up new ways of being,
all of which require the recognition and deployment of differences –
however small or transitory. It is these differences, the small
things that otherness offers us, that open us up to change, both
personally and politically.

Sometimes, it can be as simple as a new
word that heralds a shift in thinking or a story that makes us think
again about emotions, experiences or injustices. When this happens
we become other-to-ourselves because by identifying with others,
however fleetingly or partially, we shift the grounds on which our
own self rests. A space opens up for the ethical imagination, for
creating a difference in relation to ourselves which gives us the
potential to imagine new possibilities for self-other relations, for
sharing a world with others, for alternative forms of the political.
The media and the internet are important and very powerful in the
contemporary moment, but the transformative capacity of the ethical
imagination is nothing new.

Since the financial
crisis, we have heard a great deal about democratic crisis and the
deepening processes of depoliticisation and voter apathy, where the
public domain has been given over to a ghastly combination of
technocratic management, the governmentality of fear and consensual
policy-making. Various prophets and pundits have heralded the end of
a politics based on debate and the confrontation of differences, but
is this really what is happening?

Dissenters point to
the global Occupy movement, the Arab Spring and the wider spread of
youth unrest as examples of political engagement. What is
significant is the link between what is taking place in multiple
locations across the globe and attempts by protestors in specific
contexts to create new forms of politics through new ways of thinking
both about themselves and how they should relate to others, new
ethical practices.

Those who criticize
the Occupy movement for wanting change without having specific
political programmes for change and/or decry their detailed attempts
to run the movement on non-hierarchical lines completely miss this
point. Occupy sought to distance itself from what preceded it,
looking to a future promise of hope and possibility. The political
agents who will make the future need not only a new politics, but new
ways of being and doing that fundamentally reformulate self-other
relations. This has always been the thrust of utopian movements, but
it is also the basis for modern social movements and for politics
more generally. It explains why so many movements of reform begin
with intimacy and relations between women and men. Love and politics
may be different kinds of new beginnings, but together they provide a
virtuous circle of desire, hope, aspiration and rebirth.

How does this
process of remaking happen? Some of it is down to an act of will, no
doubt, but much of it is about recognizing and creating difference.
In the first instance, a difference from the old, from previous ways
of thinking, doing and being – creating a distance from or a tiny
chink in our relation to ourself.

This crucial step is what opens up
the imaginative and practical possibilities of relating to others
differently. It explains the choice of reading matter in the book
club, as well as people’s desires for their own new beginnings,
their marriages, to find a symbolic resonance for themselves and
others within spaces of possibility and hope. It is an attempt to
rethink the horizons of the political by placing one’s own life –
sometimes literally – alongside it.

It is because selves
emerge out of and depend on self-other relations that we have an
ongoing attachment to the world that links the way we are, and the
way we would like to be, to an imaginative engagement with others.
Political and economic changes depend – whatever the configurations
of power, political economy and resources – on our ethical
imaginations, bringing new ways of seeing, feeling, being and
understanding that provide further possibilities for change.

References to Occupy
and the Arab Spring in a host of political situations around the
globe can in some instances be reflective of sustained intellectual
and political engagement with ideologies, social movements and
programs for political change, but in the vast majority of cases they
are better seen as words or symbols that create and carry emotions
and identifications. In appealing to them or deploying them,
individuals and groups are attempting to create spaces for change and
also to find a way of characterising themselves, of seeing themselves
as agents of history.

Such references capture something important
about solidarity with others we have never known, but with whom we
identify, their struggles speak to our struggles, and so we can make
sense of our own orientation towards political change.

How can we explain
people’s commitment to such arduous, painful and dangerous
processes? There is no doubt that sometimes symbolism and semantics
are explicitly manipulated – this is often what we cynically intend
by referring to something as ‘political’. But this provides
little understanding of how individuals imagine and experience their
relationships with others, or the forms of identification, hope and
aspiration that motivate them, and make a real difference to how and
why they get involved in politics. Politics depends on being
attached to others and through them to the world we share.

At the
root of political protest is the ethical imagination, the capacity
and the desire to imagine and re-imagine our relations to others and
to ourselves, and to use that ability to make a difference through
politics: ‘Long live the resistance, long live love’.

About the author

Henrietta L. Moore is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work has developed a distinctive approach to the relationship between gender, sexuality and subjectivity and the processes we usually gloss as globalisation. Recent work has also focused on new technologies, virtual worlds and fantasy as generators of personal and social change. The ‘ethical imagination’ is explored in depth in her most recent book Still Life: Hopes Desires and Satisfactions (Polity Press, 2011).

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